The Miraculous Plot of Leiter & Lott (36 page)

“So police are looking for that, too?”

“Yes.”

“Anything else you want to tell me?”

“They want you to come look at his diary, again. See if you can come up with any clues.”

“Finally,” Val breathed, half to herself.

“What?” said Greg.

“Did Frank Melendez pay a ransom?”

“They're not saying. You'll have to sign a nondisclosure agreement before you'll be told, too.”

“Meaning they paid.”

“Or they didn't,” Greg added, cryptically.

Val closed her phone, and steered out of the parking lot, beeping her horn at the slow poke in front of her, just like a harried soccer mom in an SUV.

~ * ~

Ten minutes after her arrival at police headquarters, Val was finally let in to see Detective Trent. Upon entering Trent's office, she was waved into an uncomfortable metal chair opposite his desk.
 

“Hello, Valerie,” Trent greeted her, his tone neutral.

“Ms. Lott,” she corrected him sternly, in return.

He looked at her quietly for a moment. Sitting there, he seemed to study her face for clues to his approach. Finding evidence both of desperation and disdain, he obviously chose not to adopt the world weary construction his own face usually displayed. “Miss Lott, I have to tell you I'm sorry that I--”

“Can't tell me anything?” she completed his sentence. She paused, noting his unwillingness to deal from the top of the deck. “Okay, then, just give me David's journal. If you don't mind, please."

“Of course.” The detective opened a drawer, and produced the familiar Mead notebook.
 

Val took it lightly, hesitating a moment as a way to deliver her own nonverbal message. She held the notebook motionless over his desk before she finally settled back onto her hard seat.

“You were right,” Trent admitted unexpectedly, glancing up.
 
“I guess you could say I'm paid to be suspicious and cynical.”

She stared at him for a moment in surprise. “Thank you.”

“Do you mind if I ask. . .if you love him?”

“
Excuse
me?”

“What does he mean to you, exactly?”

“Nothing. He doesn't mean anything. He is. He's not a thing, detective.”

“I see. Has this. . .thing. . . happened to you before?”

She paused, deciding if and how to answer, unclear of his motive in asking.
 
Or whether she even knew the answer. In the end, by her silence, she didn't need to say anything at all.

“How does it feel?” Trent asked, softly.

She looked down at her hand and smiled. Imagined a ring there. Flashed on a conjured ceremony--a church, flowers, rice, limousine, island lei. Then the cliché images dissolved, as something more real than all of it took its place:
 
an image of David's gentle face, as he sat next to her under a gazebo.
 

 
Trent nodded, thoughtfully. After a moment he said, “Oh, and may I suggest that you start reading at the place in the notebook after where he gives up dating his entries?"

Their eyes met, and held. “Why is that?”

“We haven't much time to find your. . .friend. Statistically speaking.”

“So you really don't think he's an accomplice?”

“Anything is possible, but it's unlikely. I mean, considering the stolen vehicles, and what's written in that notebook.”

Val nodded toward the large electric clock on the wall. “Time is running out?”

“I don't think David would put it that way, but yes, I think it is. If it hasn't run out already. Of course time is an illusion, isn't it?”

She stared at his face for expected derision. To her surprise, she found a hint of envy, instead. As if Trent secretly wished he'd conversed with David himself, as well.
 

What was it David had written?
 

She looked down at the notebook, running her hand down the cover, half fearful of the secrets she might find inside. But she had to know. Had to see in order to understand.
 

Resolutely, she opened the cover. Quickly, then, she turned the pages to the unnumbered entries that Trent had suggested. And she began to read.

A train whistle accompanies freight cars that clatter past old warehouses in the night. Is the rise and fall of such a whistle lonely by nature?
 
If not, why do I feel it in my soul?
 
What is the soul of a man? No one knows. I'm alone with only myself.
 
But who is that?
 
It's whom I'm writing these thoughts to, certainly. I say my name. I say "David."
 
It sounds strange to say aloud, because I know I am not David. The word is only a symbol, like a sign pointing toward a cloud.
 
So "David" writes to "Melissa," and asks what has been the reason for his life. His looking at the stars. This world, which is supposed to be home, has become foreign to him since her passing. It is no longer the same place. He doesn't recognize it anymore. Who is this person he sees in the mirror? Of course there is a pulse. There is a growing beard, and scraggly hair. What animates him, though, and for what purpose? He tries to make sense of it by writing things down, as he once did as a teen in the night, propelled by sudden insight, from solitude. He listens to people talking, too, but their voices now seem to claim substance like a plea. Meanwhile, days turn relentlessly toward a
seasonless
season. Objects become relics, and faces have no connection to names.

----------

A strange thing has happened. Yesterday afternoon I was putting away my shirt in the closet when I noticed that one of Melissa's shoes had been mixed with the things I'd moved out of the house. I sat beside it, and then I couldn't get back up.
 
The prospect of living alone in this trailer, again, which I've moved here, listening for sounds that prove to be only whispers of air. . . I just sat there in mute terror. What am I to do, if I can't live in the house or here? I thought. But then, after a time, when it started to get dark, I saw the light dimming, and a new vision came to me, then. I imagined my sunset as someone else's sunrise. Someone just like me was sitting on a wooden floor in India, or in a shack in the rainforest in Bali, and this person, who could have been me as much as I him, was afraid to face the truth, too. Although his world was different, it was also the same, due to his loss.
 
A statue of the Buddha was there with him, and the picture of a smiling little boy, dressed in bright blue silk.
 
When this man held up the photo to show me, to my surprise I saw that it was a child I remembered from the grocery store, years ago, his eyes so full of excitement at the concept of strawberry ice cream that when I asked his mother if I could buy him the treat, Mom, gauging our intent, saw the same thing in my eyes as in her son's. And then, because she saw her child in this new light, she said, "I surrender." Remembering this, I felt relief somehow.
 
My friend in India or Bali did too, and so we both fell asleep on the floor.
   

----------

What's truly valuable? I need to know. Is it the soaring stock that can be tracked online? Is it a diamond or a house on an island? The clean leather smell of a new luxury car? Or is it rather just the sunlight on the sidewalk. Or is it toasting the day with a friend, even if the glass is half empty and the drink water? Or holding a child's hand crossing the street. . . massaging a lover's neck while sitting in a bus stop cubical in the rain. . . the wind in the chimney, playing out of tune pipes. . . the rustle of leaves high up toward the crescent moon? Is it being powerful and in control, or is just laying in scented grass and watching the rays of sunset focus on distant clouds that you know hover over someone else's head?

----------

A history lesson. The Spartans in the age of ancient Greece reveled in war, sacrificed their young in barbaric tests of strength. They enslaved their neighbors, plundered and murdered women and children, while all the time believing in the survival and glory of the fittest, and in future nirvana, just as Hitler and Stalin believed. And what happened to them and their madness? All of those who thought this way? Ask
Ozymandias
.

Trent's phone rang, interrupting Val's reading of David's journal. She lowered the journal and waited, only to witness a disturbing transformation overtake Trent's face and demeanor. Holding the receiver lightly, the detective first casually asked the caller, “Where?” Then some new revelation came, which seemed to perturb his innate detachment. His tone dismissed the subtle promise of resolution as he asked, “When?” Finally, he gripped the phone, his voice becoming almost bleak as he said, “Okay, I'll be right there.”

“What is it?” Val asked.

Hanging up, Trent nodding slightly to himself, as though considering his options. He bit at his lower lip, breathed deeply, then ran a hand through his hair. Finally, he opened his mouth several times in aborted attempts to speak, before announcing, “They've discovered
Leiter's
car, Ms. Lott. I mean Valerie.
 
Plates didn't match, but the VIN number did. They also have a man in custody.
 
And I'm afraid it's not David.”

Val started to speak, but now found that she couldn't. She could tell that this wasn't the only news Trent dreaded to reveal. There was something more.
 
Something worse. She could see it in his eyes.
 

“Who . . ?” she mouthed.

Trent looked at the wall to her left, as if a spider crawled there.
 

Val followed the direction of his gaze, but there was no spider, only a slight indentation---fist sized---in the pale gray plaster.
 

“I'm sorry,” the detective said quietly, almost as an afterthought, “but they found a blood stain in the trunk as well.”

In a moment of terrible lucidity, Val watched as ten long seconds drained the color from her face in the restroom mirror. She dropped both of her palms down onto either side of the white porcelain sink, and next felt her knees give way until her forehead lay against the cold enamel. Unable to join Trent in confronting the suspect, she now felt the weight of loss pull her down and down, past the environs of measured grief, toward a more chaotic unknown.
 
She resisted the pull, forcing strength into her weakened legs, yet fierce tears still blurred her vision as she set her jaw to the effort.
 

The inequity of it. The
injustice.

Rising to see her reflection again, she hated the stranger she saw in the mirror. The woman who had betrayed her own heart so often it had become second nature to accept the vanity of others. Hated with ardent revulsion ever doubting her instincts, her spirit, her very life. With bitter anguish, she struck the image in the mirror with her fist. Again and again she punched the glass until the face there shattered into a mosaic---a broken jigsaw of her fractured self.

When a large slab of jagged glass slipped from the bent frame, she whipped her hand up in reaction, and a deep gash sliced into her forearm, as though from a razor. Then the pane tumbled to the floor, and a small explosion of tinkling shards reverberated from the blue tile as she stared down at the gushing cut near her wrist in disbelief.
 

Oh God. . .
 

She felt faint at the sight. Her breathing and heartbeat became shallow and rapid.
 
When another explosion followed, it seemed distant and unreal. The uniformed cop that had burst through the door saw her holding her wounded wrist over the sink. Saw her slip half conscious to the floor. Then she had the numbed sensation of falling forever toward an event horizon of infinite darkness below. Toward a tunnel that rushed up to funnel her tighter and tighter into a place where time and space itself shut down.

But it was not the end of sensation. Not the mindless dark she feared at all.
 
Instead, she emerged from the tunnel into a bright, empty house. A house that held no furniture but a card table and folding chair. Devoid of life except for her own presence, the space resonated such complete focus that even a painting, mirror or plant would have seemed a violation.
   

Not knowing what to do, Val sat in the chair, looking out the window at her new neighbors. Next door, a family could be seen washing their van, the dad spraying mom and their two kids, all of them laughing and playing on the glistening grass. Dad wore a baseball cap, blue tee shirt, and blue jeans. Mom wore green shorts like the kids, and a denim shirt with rolled up sleeves. A tiny Terrier dog appeared, jumping and yipping excitedly in circles, but Val couldn't watch them long. She looked back at the bare wall opposite her, instead.
 

Then down.
 

On the table before her, now, was a notebook. A blank Mead notebook, like the kind kids used at school. A notebook with a black cover also dotted by stars. It was apparently all she owned, besides her immaculate, empty house, and a journal in which to record her thoughts about that.
 
But the house itself was a trap, she knew. A big, empty box. There was no furniture coming. No moving van on the way.